Third Manchester picture in a row. Among other things I was filmed today as part of some contractual arrangement or other. Three five-minute takes and it was done. While the preceding talking head was shot I snapped this shot of the cameraman (the one who looks a bit like Rimmer out of Red Dwarf at the back) and director: it captures them quite well I think. Just as well as I was too busy to take more than about three or four photos today.
This couple were pictured outside the Sackville Building at the University of Manchester this morning, which was incidentally another beautiful, but chilly one.
Do I talk too much on this blog? Do I need to say why I find this picture aesthetically pleasing? I’ll leave it.
Actually this is the Beyer Building, at the University of Manchester, in some rather spectacular autumn plumage. But it does look like Dracula’s castle. I can quite see him striding past one of those windows in the middle of the night. (Or perhaps I think that because personages of the university administration reside here.)
All the students arrive all at once, and it’s both the most hectic time of the year as well as the most optimistic, in some ways. Everyone’s fresh, we meet people for the first time and learn about their hopes and aspirations. Scary time too, for them at least. Hence the ‘Purple People’ who have dotted themselves around the campus, and they’re being used, as you see here.
Significant academic year for me too. I am on sabbatical in the second semester and from mid-December to late August will not be in Manchester at all. January – June I will be in Australia. Looking forward to it…
An unexciting subject for a photo but this was an unexciting day. It does at least mark the first appearance of the exterior of the Ellen Wilkinson Building at university, in which I (occasionally) work. Named for the UK’s first female Minister of Education, by the way. But not a building of great architectural merit, inside or out.
Awwww. Snapped today during a working lunch in the Students’ Union in Manchester. As well as her super-cuteness I like the symmetry of the various hands and limbs of both mother and baby but also the asymmetry of the other face in the background. Iris (5 months) thus becomes the youngest person to feature on this blog.
Another one of those days: look up, see a sky, want to move to a different city. Half an hour after this came another intense cloudburst: until a couple of months ago I’d have said ‘I’d never seen anything like it before’ but of course we have. (The building is the AQA headquarters on the Manchester campus.)
Today was a dull day in every respect. The grey skies and rain are now a permanent feature of existence. Back in Manchester for the first time in 10 days but I spent most of it in my office, which isn’t a particularly great photographic subject (which is why there have been, to date, precisely no photos of it on this blog). This is the university’s new ‘learning commons’, due to open in time for the next academic year, and doubtless full of all sorts of exciting new devices that someone has decided will ‘enhance the learning experience’. Not that they ever asked any of the academics around Manchester who specialise in educational technology their opinion as to how it should be built. I know this, because I am one of them. I am sure it will be just perfect.
Despite how it probably appears from this blog, I do spend the usual proportion of my life at work. But it appears relatively rarely on here simply because it’s not usually appropriate to whip the camera out and start taking photos of colleagues, students, whomever I should run into in the course of working life. Here’s an exception. And well done to my student Ainna (not pictured) who passed her part of this event unconditionally.
I know I did this theme a couple of days ago but there really wasn’t any other photo today which encapsulated what was an absolutely glorious spring day.
Incidentally, those who know the Manchester campus may be bemused as to where this is, because it really must be one of the least green campuses in Britain – there is hardly any green space, plus this bloody big road running right through the middle of it. Trust me however: this is just outside Blackwell’s, under the ramp to the shopping precinct and opposite the Kilburn building.
Being 42 